[parpfish]

I'm far less worried about ethical issues that arise from building AGI (or soemthing very close to it) than I am about the ethical issues that arise from building really good machine-learning models (that a marketing department calls AI).

Things like the alignment problem, post-scarcity economics, the legal status of sentient machines are all issues to be dealt with, but theyre are pretty speculative at this point.

Problems that stem from deepfakes, voice cloning, bias in algorithmic decision making are already here and need to be dealt with.

[soiltype]

Like many situations in the current world, it's all a problem. Those with profit incentives to do so will create as many problems for society as they can.

None of it is merely a distraction, we just don't have the capacity to defend against all of it.

It is fair to say we might be practically better off focusing on one form of attack and sacrificing defense against another, but the only way to actually be safe is to stop your enemy from attacking at all. Either we shut down breakneck AI development (nearly impossible and guaranteed to have its own bad outcomes) or we slide rapidly into a more and more dangerous world.